Feds: Florida prison a cesspool of sex abuse
MIAMI – In a scathing rebuke of Florida’s Department of Corrections, the U.S. Department of Justice has found that officers at Lowell Correctional Institution have raped, sodomized, beaten and choked countless female inmates as part of a pattern of civil rights abuses that goes back years.
The sexual torment by staff at the women’s prison so horrified DOJ investigators that they have put the state on notice, instructing prison officials to institute remedial measures to protect inmates within 49 days or face legal consequences.
“(The) sexual abuse of women prisoners by Lowell corrections officers and staff is severe and prevalent throughout the prison,” DOJ said in a report issued Tuesday. These acts, DOJ noted, continue at the Central Florida prison in violation the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
For at least a decade, women at the prison have complained that officers tramp through their dorms and showers and grope, rape and threaten to beat and even kill them if they don’t comply with the officers’ sexual demands. If they report the abuse, they are subjected to retaliation, are thrown into solitary confinement or lose visiting privileges with their children and families.
Inmates told DOJ investigators that they are attacked in bathrooms, closets, laundry areas, outdoors and in officers’ stations. Sometimes officers march into their sleeping quarters in the middle of the night and force themselves upon them.
“We are so used to Lowell getting away with everything. It’s got to stop now. I hope this is a big hammer on top of that prison,” said Debra Bennett, an activist who has been fighting for reforms at Lowell for years.
“Our punishment was to be removed from society for our crimes – not to be raped or groped or pushed and beaten, crippled and killed.”
Federal investigators reviewed over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewed dozens of inmates at the facility, the second-largest women’s prison in the country.
The sprawling, dilapidated compound, located in Ocala, has been the focus of federal scrutiny since 2018.
The DOJ discovered that the prison’s culture not only fostered an environment where sexual assault and exploitation happened, it found they were thriving.
“Prisoners spoke of sex between staff and prisoners as a regular event, suggesting a normalization of sexual abuse by staff,’’ the report said.
Corrections officers frequently withhold basic necessities, such as soap and toilet paper, from the prisoners as leverage to get them to perform sexual favors, DOJ found.
Even as DOJ investigators were visiting the prison and collecting evidence, prison staff continued to intimidate and sexually violate Lowell inmates.
Among the litany of crimes listed in the report was a 2018 incident in which a sergeant grabbed an inmate, pulled her clothes off and sodomized her; another involved an officer who took a prisoner outdoors, pushed her down on the ground and put his penis in her mouth; a third cited an officer with a history of sexual abuse complaints who woke an inmate in the middle of the night, forced her to have sex, then supplied her with prescription drugs.